The Brontes have been 'queered'

[biddyboo]

For Pride month, the Bronte Parsonage museum has posted a number of Facebook posts exploring the Brontes and 'gender identity'

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/eGENRmGQPkz7omY5/

The posts talk about the Brontes using 'androgynous' pseudonyms, rather than the male pseudonyms they were necessitated to use due to the sexism of the times they lived in 😕

It hasn't gone down well. Comments were disabled, and the museum posted about commitment to equality and diversity and not tolerating bullying and hatred (I haven't seen evidence of this, just a lot of people outraged about history being rewritten to suit a narrative).

She also lives for about 400 years if I remember correctly. It is not a book that is meant to be taken literally and it’s rather concerning that this needs pointing out!

In a previous discussion about the validity of gender identity, I was genuinely asked "If you woke up as a different sex would you think or behave differently" as though this was some kind of gotcha, perhaps about the separation of my body from my "feelz".

In the unlikely event that this would actually happen I'm still not certain what difference it might make about anything at all.

I. Did see a thread (on threads) a few weeks ago claiming that what made JKRs TERFiness even worse was that she had previously claimed to be male by a) publishing the HP books as JK not Joanne. And b) using the pseudonym Robert.
I mean, on point a she never claimed to be male. IIRC she was told to publish as JK so people didn't know she was a woman as "boys wouldn't read books by a female author"
Point b, I guess she was "pretending" to be a man. But she never actually thought she was. Plenty of authors (especially female ones) have used male pen names. Because of the patriarchy. Not for gender ID reasons.

It’s so silly the way they try to argue their point. If I woke up as a different person regardless of sex I’d be freaked out. I’m not sure what conclusion has to be drawn from that.

Once I’d got over the shock (if indeed I ever did) I’d certainly be very fascinated by the willy between my legs - but maybe that’s not what they meant.

• It's a museum devoted to 3 women who were unable to go to university because of their sex, whose options for income were severely limited because of their sex, who weren't able to publish initially under their own names because of their sex, and one of whom died in pregnancy because of her sex.

The modern middle class luxury belief of gender identity has literally zero relevance to their lives and works. *

This is such a good summary of the issue IMO

This is such a dumb argument.

If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man I would be upset and freaked out because I have a lifetime's worth of memories of being a woman. I'd be devastated not to be able to breastfeed my daughter anymore. Fuck, maybe my kids wouldn't even recognise me. It would be awful.

This is not the position trans people are in.

Freaky Friday is fiction, not real life.

Trans women have spent their entire lives living as males. Troubled, gender non conforming males, perhaps, but males nonetheless. They have zero frame of reference for living in a female body. They are most certainly not women trapped in a man's body.

Sorry you are not.

In your opinion. And in 2024.

tbf I just copied and pasted the original nit comb text and changed it to reference lawn mowers. It is all utterly bonkers.

Give me strength. I haven't read the full thread but thoroughly enjoyed reading the FB comments. A further treat is the dismayed response from the museum i.e. 'These hostile comments are bullying our staff'. No, it is not 'bullying' it is people not agreeing with you, just the same as any other disagreement on a point of literary or historical interpretation. Live with the disagreement and/or refute their arguments if you choose to do so.

This comment was quite interesting:

'If "transwomen" have always existed, where were they when women were classed as property and weren't allowed to vote, own land, property or open bank accounts? Where were they when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife? If they've always been amongst us, why have they never shown any allyship to women and girls? Why are they only crawling out of the woodwork now all the hard graft in achieving equality has been done?'

If there's ever a qualification in Gender Bollocks, that would make an excellent exam task.

"Using the Mary Rose Nit Comb Template, write a blog post for the Bakewell Pudding Museum."

For a moment I thought there might actually be a Bakewell Pudding Museum, but alas it seems not.

Brilliantly done @MagpiePi , and this is also a beguiling description in spite of the mockery.

You could work for J Walter Thompson as well as be a Rainbow garnerer for museums.

An unfortunate misprint, A Womb of One’s Own was what she meant to write, but no one spotted it until the first copies had been sent out for review, by which time it was too late. An object lesson to us all to be very careful with articulation whether we are dictating our masterpieces to slightly deaf shorthand typists, or using voice activated word programmes.

I would also like to take this opportunity to celebrate Shakespeare’s little recognised attempt to bring Therian culture into the mainstream of popular theatre. People see Bottom in his asses head as a figure of fun, but no one acknowledges the inner pain and despair of a soul in transition whose only way of expressing his true identity for a few brief moments is to allow himself to be ridiculed and mocked by other characters. We the audience are complicit in this cruel bullying, and we should own this, make a stand , and demand that Bottom is given the opportunity to be himself, both to celebrate his assness and embrace and be embraced for his bravery in coming out of the stable.

'These hostile comments are bullying our staff'. No, it is not 'bullying' it is people not agreeing with you, just the same as any other disagreement on a point of literary or historical interpretation. Live with the disagreement and/or refute their arguments if you choose to do so.

I am pretty sure Charlotte Bronte herself would have disagreed vehemently with this shite and been pretty good at putting her thoughts into words. I wonder if they'd have slapped her down too.

True. Woolf oscillated between models of androgyny and essentialism constantly throughout her writing. That opposition is starkly illustrated in A Room of One's Own as opposed to Three Guineas, to cite two very obvious examples.

Her own sexuality also likely informs her best-known essays and some of her novels. Of course we can't know anything about Shakespeare, other than a possible sexual ambivelence detectable in his writing.

But this has little to do with what's now come to be thought of as gender identity. If Foucault is right, and our gendered 'subject positions' vary vastly between historical time and geographical space, then such questions would simply have been irrelevant in those times anyway. As would, for instance, the idea of childhood.

An unfortunate misprint, A Womb of One’s Own was what she meant to write, but no one spotted it until the first copies had been sent out for review, by which time it was too late. An object lesson to us all to be very careful with articulation whether we are dictating our masterpieces to slightly deaf shorthand typists, or using voice activated word programmes.

'For we think back through our mothers, if we are women'.

Seems someone took the idea of author-matrilineage a little too literally!

Add in a pink version and Bob's your new 'auntie'.

The existence of Minnie Gertrude Ellis Jeffreys doesn't make 'Ellis' a recognisably unisex first name in the 19th century any more than her mother's name, Elizabeth Anne Mann Corker, means that 'Mann' was a unisex name.

It wasn't unheard of for boys to be given surnames as first names, sometimes their mother's maiden name or another family name. I haven't come across it for girls. (The literary among us may note Linton Heathcliff and Pitt Crawley.) Middle names, yes.

Regardless, ascribing gender identity nonsense to 19th century women on the basis of pseudonyms used to hide their sex is ludicrous and anachronistic and I'm glad they're getting pushback for it.

We the audience are complicit in this cruel bullying, and we should own this, make a stand , and demand that Bottom is given the opportunity to be himself, both to celebrate his assness and embrace and be embraced for his bravery in coming out of the stable

Surely Bottom was just trying to bring his hole self to work?

Bwa ha ha 🤣

You see, it's the anachronistic approach we see all the time now. It totally infuriates me.

Imposing today's obsessions on the past demeans- totally demeans- and distorts-their achievements.

Yes they took androgynous noms de plume, but as anyone knows who has the slightest interest knows that was a way to circumvent the sexism of the time. Their themes were not 'womanly' and they knew it, so stood little chance of publication if submitted in their real names.

But they stood by their art. They were trail blazers, all of them, in different ways.

To suggest otherwise, or even infer it, is utterly ludicrous. Totally ashamed of the Brontë society.

But as another poster perceptively observed, maybe they have boxes to tick on grant applications.

It does everyone a disservice. The authors more than anyone. I can only imagine Charlotte's wry and ascerbic comments on this lunacy.

They did publish under different names but that had nothing whatsoever to do with exploring gender identity...

It was simply because as women they would not have been taken seriously as writers by publishers or the general public at the time.

It is awful to try to rewrite history like this and it betrays the memories of these writers.

Not to mention that there are many examples of celebrated female writers who were gay or bisexual and they should be the ones highlighted when discussing the topic of gender, creativity and sexuality.

Exactly @Startingagainandagain